BeerDEcoded: 1st public workshop

On the 31st of March, we hold our first public workshop for the BeerDEcoded project in Freiburg. Some students and external people participated to this event: 16 peoples in total, including us.

We started the day with a short introduction to beer, yeast, DNA and of course lab safety. Then all participants took part in some fun games on pipetting and centrifuging to make them more comfortable with both.

We extracted yeast DNA of the not filtered Waldhaus, a local Black Forest beer.

Then DNA extraction went well. In parallel, we started our DNA sequencing protocol using a previously extracted DNA from Rothaus, another local beer. Here we encountered several problems during the library preparation and the sequencing likely due to mistakes in the protocols and reuse of old flowcell. We will improve the protocol to fix the issues.

We then analyzed the data using Galaxy.

The participants and we enjoyed the day a lot!

Feedbacks

At the end of the day, we collected some interesting feedbacks:

Questions

Score

How much did you like the workshop overall?

3.6 /5

Did you find the content interesting?

4.2 /5

Was the content understandable?

3 /5

Did you learn something today?

3.8 /5

Were your questions answered?

3.5 /5

Do you think what you learned will be useful for your life?

3.4 /5

What did you like particularly?

DNA extracting part

Handling the pipette

Learn a little bit how experiments are conducted in a lab

The lab work, really interesting

The interactivity

What could be improved?

Sequencing

More structure in what is done

The transition between different topics and their justification could have been a little bit better explained

Introduction: explain each new term in one sentence at 1st usage

Try to always present why we are doing what in this moment

Do you have any suggestions?

A sheet that describes all steps which are done (a summary without details)

Explain the workflows using some charts or figure, illustrating each performed step

Projector for talks (presentations)

A step-by-step overview over the workshop parts

How to make the next event better?

This workshop was our first public one. We learnt a lot during this day: what works but also what we need to improve.

We met few days after the event and come up with some ideas:

Improving the library preparation protocols

Create good introduction

Create posters with the protocols

Restructure the whole day with a more precise schedule

Simplify the terms we use

etc

We will implement them during the next months to be ready for our next workshop in July.